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The King's Christmas pudding: globalization, recipes, and the commodities of empire*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

Kaori O’Connor
Kaori O’Connor
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Food globalization has been in train for some ten millennia,1 driven by, and driving, war, trade, imperialism, colonialism, and culture. Within economic history, the dominant discipline in the study of globalization, only the first four are dealt with in any depth, invariably focusing on production and the supply side. By contrast, there have been relatively few studies of globalization in terms of culture, consumption, and the demand side, resulting in an incomplete understanding of the ways in which material life, cultural values, and political imperatives interact in a global context. These dynamics are examined in this anthropological account of culture and commerce in Britain and the empire in the interwar years, focusing on a dish that assumed tremendous symbolic and economic importance – the King's Christmas pudding

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 127 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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